Friendster Archive

Last month at the Web 2.0 Expo, none of the major U.S. social networks had an expo booth. But one of the most talked about booths was Friendster and their sign that read "#1 in Asia". Apparently Friendster has over 60 million users in Asia. Tonight Friendster has announced that Facebook applications are now portable overview to the Friendster developer platform. In essence if you have a Facebook application, you can now expose it to 60 million more potential users in Asia.

Apparently there is only a 22% overlap in audiences between both social networks making the choice to port attractive. The Friendster application directory only has 600 applications so those who port quickly may see a nice bump versus the tens of thousands of Facebook applications currently available.

Adam Ostrow has a good review of the launch which includes his note about the challenge to developers to make them attractive to a different audience. Ostrow goes on to explain that Facebook developers should utilize the crowdsourced translation options on Facebook before they port apps over to Friendster.

Looks like we will see a developer showdown between Facebook’s fbOpen and that of Google supported OpenSocial. Somehow my guess the showdown will push developers to create applications that work on both platforms.

Pingdom is out with their latest stats regarding downtime for the major social networks for the first 60-ish days in 2008. Bebo leads the list with over 12 hours of downtime after their big downtime in January. We wondered if that downtime was due to the rapid expansion of the Bebo developer platform.

Other notables on the list include Friendster with 6 hours of downtime, LinkedIn at 4 hours, Facebook at 95 minutes and LiveJournal at 10 minutes.

As a side note, these type of blog posts from Pingdom are what I try to explain to new startups all the time. Use your tools to show off your tools. This is something I rarely see and, where applicable, should be on every marketing plan.

Monitoring service WatchMouse has published a report today of many of the largest social networking sites customer experiences. They derive the scores based on load times plus penalties for non-load. Facebook is the worst scoring of all of the tested networks (about 100 total). Immediately I wonder about the report seeing as though Twitter is rated in the middle of the pack knowing how much downtime Twitter has had since launch.

Some of the best scoring networks include: Pownce, Meetup, Xing, Geni and Flickr. Check out the full report to view each network. Which reported networks stand out to you?

Of the 104 sites monitored, 51 show a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 1000 or more, making them very slow in load time.

Here are the worst 10 performing networks:

Social networking site Friendster is announcing their latest language localization options adding Japanese and Korean. This comes two months after they launched the Chinese language option. Friendster shared, "As the 12th largest Web site in the world based on traffic and the #1 online social network in Asia, according to comScore Media Metrix, supporting both Japanese and Korean will help Friendster maintain and extend its leadership position in Asia."

Friendster now supports five of the top languages on the Internet — Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and English. These languages represent 66 percent of the world’s Internet users, or approximately three quarters of a billion Internet users in total.

Comscore Media Metrix ranks Friendster as the #1 social network in the Asia Pacific region and the #3 branded online social network in the world. Friendster also shared a language study of Internet users from InternetWorldStats.com, June 2007: